Speaker Bio
Mark is a PhD student at the university of Exeter with a background in comparative anthropology and theology (Oxon). He presented research at ICPR, Harvard, Tallinn, Breaking Convention, Beyond Psychedelics, and the American Academy of Religion, and was selected as an emerging scholar for Harvard’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality for his ethnography of Crossbones Graveyard.
Son of a priest and a witch, Mark is interested in chemical mysticism and the integration of psychedelics through cultures, having has worked in chaplaincies based in university, school, prison, and hospice. Poems and comparative theology are published with the Psychedelic Press.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Dr Hoffmann, the Determination Police, and Angela Carter’s Critique of the Counterculture
To critique a critique takes panache, and Angela Carter had plenty. This paper unpacks Carter’s critique of psychedelic counterculture.
Her 1972 novel, 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann' imagines a South American town besieged by a maddening scientist whose machines manifest people’s deepest wants as multi-sensory hallucinations. It follows the mission of a mestizo double-agent from the Ministry of Determination, Desiderio, tasked with finding the mysterious Doctor Hoffman. The “Determination Police” is a pun exposing both their role as ‘determiners’ of the real and unreal and their single-minded ‘determination’ to get the job done. Unlike the Blue Meanies of Yellow Submarine, however, Carter’s (anti-)heroes illustrate the interactive and complicated relationship between want and need, power and greed, ire and desire.
Desiderio’s elongated and fantastical encounters on his quest to find the origin of hallucination – with native people, centaurs, and a peep-show – invigorate both convincing characterisations and a narrative essay on the relationships between machine, media and perception, authority and liberty, ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, reality and imaginary. Literary analysis so far has focussed on Proust’s ‘Albertine’ and the morality tales of Struwwelpeter. Secondary literature neglects to situate this book in the political wranglings of the 60s and 70: psychedelics also are reality-machines. An Easter Egg so far has been missed: what if Albert Hoffmann’s LSD was the nano-technological and imaginal desire machine depicted? This paper is the first to connect the Hoffman of Carter with the Hoffmann of LSD, puncturing the implosive hope such a reading entails.